Fortunes of Feminism (11 page)

2. ENCLAVED AND RUNAWAY NEEDS: ON THE

“POLITICAL,” “ECONOMIC,” AND “DOMESTIC”

Let me now situate the discourse model I have just sketched with respect to some social-structural features of late-capitalist societies. Here, I seek to relate the rise of politicized needs-talk to shifts in the boundaries separating “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” dimensions of life. However, unlike many social theorists, I shall treat the terms “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” as cultural classifications and ideological labels rather than as designations of structures, spheres, or things.
⁹

I begin by noting that the terms “politics” and “political” are highly contested and have a number of different senses.
¹⁰
In the present context, the two most important senses are the following. There is, first, an institutional sense, in which a matter is deemed “political” if it is handled directly in the institutions of the official governmental system, including parliaments, administrative apparatuses, and the like. In this sense, what is political
—
call it “official-political”—contrasts with what is handled in institutions like “the family” and “the economy,” which are defined as being outside the official-political system, even though they are in actuality underpinned and regulated by it. In addition, there is, second, a discursive sense of the term “political” in which something is “political” if it is contested across a broad range of different discursive arenas and among a wide range of different publics. In this sense, what is political
—
call it “discursive-political” or “politi
cized
”
—
contrasts both with what is not contested in public at all and also with what is contested only by and within relatively specialized, enclaved, and/or segmented publics. These two senses are not unrelated. In democratic theory, if not always in practice, a matter becomes subject to legitimate state intervention only after it has been debated across a wide range of discourse publics.

In general, there are no a priori constraints dictating that some matters are intrinsically political and others are intrinsically not. As a matter of fact, these boundaries are drawn differently from culture to culture and from historical period to historical period. For example, reproduction became an intensely political matter in the 1890s in the US amid a panic about “race suicide.” By the 1940s, however, it was widely assumed that birth control was a “private” matter. Finally, with the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s, reproduction was repoliticized.
¹¹

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that, for any society in any period, the boundary between what is political and what is not is simply fixed. On the contrary, this boundary may itself be an object of conflict. For example, struggles over Poor Law “reform” in nineteenth-century England were also conflicts about the scope of the political. And as I shall argue shortly, one of the primary stakes of social conflict in late-capitalist societies is precisely where the limits of the political will be drawn.

Let me spell out some of the presuppositions and implications of the discursive sense of “politics.” Recall that this sense stipulates that a matter is “political” if it is contested across a range of different discursive arenas and among a range of different discourse publics. Note, therefore, that it depends upon the idea of discursive publicity. However, in this conception, publicity is not understood in a simple unitary way as the undifferentiated opposite of discursive privacy. Rather, publicity is understood to be differentiated on the assumption that it is possible to identify a plurality of distinct discourse publics and to theorize the relations among them.

Clearly, publics can be distinguished along a number of different axes, for example: by ideology (the readership of
The Nation
versus the readership of
The Public Interest
), by stratification axes such as gender (the viewers of “Cagney and Lacey” versus the viewers of “Monday Night Football”) or class (the readership of
The New York Times
versus that of
The New York Post
), by profession (the membership of the Chamber of Commerce versus that of the American Medical Association), by central mobilizing issue (the nuclear freeze movement versus the pro-life movement).

Publics can also be distinguished in terms of relative power. Some are large, authoritative, and able to set the terms of debate for many of the rest. Others, by contrast, are small, self-enclosed, and enclaved, unable to make much of a mark beyond their own borders. Publics of the former sort are often able to take the lead in the formation of hegemonic blocs: concatenations of different publics, which together construct “the common sense” of the day. As a result, such leading publics usually have a heavy hand in defining what is “political” in the discursive sense. They can politicize an issue simply by entertaining contestation concerning it, since such contestation will be transmitted as a matter of course to and through other allied and opposing publics. Smaller, counter-hegemonic publics, by contrast, generally lack the power to politicize issues in this way. When they succeed in fomenting widespread contestation over what was previously “nonpolitical,” it is usually by far slower and more laborious means. In general, it is the relative power of various publics that determines the outcome of struggles over the boundaries of the political.

How, then, should we conceptualize the politicization of needs in late-capitalist societies? What must be grasped here are the processes by which some matters break out of zones of discursive privacy and out of specialized or enclaved publics so as to become foci of generalized contestation. When this happens, previously taken-for-granted interpretations of these matters are called into question, and naturalized chains of in-order-to relations become subject to dispute.

What, then, are the zones of privacy and the specialized publics that previously enveloped newly politicized needs in late-capitalist societies? Which institutions sheltered these needs from contestation, naturalizing their interpretations in taken-for-granted networks of in-order-to relations? In male-dominated, capitalist societies, what is “political” is normally defined in contrast to what is “economic” and “domestic” or “personal.” Here, accordingly, we encounter two principal sets of institutions that depoliticize social needs: first, domestic institutions, especially the normative domestic form, namely, the modern, male-headed, nuclear family; and, second, official-economic capitalist system institutions, especially paid workplaces, markets, credit mechanisms, and “private” enterprises and corporations.
¹²
Domestic institutions depoliticize certain matters by personalizing and/or familializing them; they cast these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradistinction to public, political matters. Official-economic capitalist system institutions depoliticize certain matters by economizing them; the issues in question here are cast as impersonal market imperatives or as “private” ownership prerogatives or as technical problems for managers and planners, all in contradistinction to political matters. In both cases, the result is a foreshortening of chains of in-order-to relations for interpreting people's needs; interpretive chains are truncated and prevented from spilling across the boundaries separating “the domestic” and “the economic” from “the political.”

Clearly, domestic and official-economic system institutions differ in many important respects. However, in
these
respects they are exactly on a par with one another: both enclave certain matters into specialized discursive arenas; both thereby shield such matters from generalized contestation and from widely disseminated conflicts of interpretation. As a result, both entrench as authoritative certain specific interpretations of needs by embedding them in certain specific, but largely unquestioned, chains of in-order-to relations.

Since both domestic and official-economic system institutions support relations of dominance and subordination, the specific interpretations they naturalize usually tend to advantage dominant groups and individuals and to disadvantage their subordinates. If wife battering, for example, is enclaved as a “personal” or “domestic” matter within male-headed, nuclear families; and if public discourse about this phenomenon is canalized into specialized publics associated with, say, family law, social work, and the sociology and psychology of “deviancy”; then this serves to reproduce women's subordination to men. Similarly, if questions of workplace democracy are enclaved as “economic” or “managerial” problems in profit-oriented, hierarchically managed, paid workplaces; and if discourse about these questions is shunted into specialized publics associated with, say, “industrial relations” sociology, labor law, and “management science”; then this serves to perpetuate class (and usually also gendered and raced) exploitation and domination.

As a result of these processes, members of subordinated groups commonly internalize need interpretations that work to their own disadvantage. Sometimes, however, culturally dominant need interpretations are superimposed upon latent or embryonic oppositional interpretations. This is most likely where there persist, however fragmentedly, subculturally transmitted traditions of resistance, as in some sections of the US labor movement and in the collective historical memory of many African Americans. Under special circumstances, moreover, processes of depoliticization are disrupted. At that point, dominant classifications of needs as “economic” or “domestic,” as opposed to “political,” lose their aura of self-evidence, and alternative, oppositional, and
politicized
interpretations emerge in their stead.
¹³

In late-capitalist societies, in any case, family and official-economy are the principal depoliticizing enclaves that needs must exceed in order to become political in the discursive sense. Thus, the emergence of needs-talk as a political idiom in these societies is the other side of the increased permeability of domestic and official-economic institutions, their growing inability to fully depoliticize certain matters. The politicized needs at issue in late-capitalist societies, then, are
leaky
or
runaway
needs, which have broken out of the discursive enclaves constructed in and around domestic and official-economic institutions.

Runaway needs are a species of
excess
with respect to the normative modern domestic and economic institutions. Initially at least, they bear the stamp of those institutions, remaining embedded in conventional chains of in-order-to relations. For example, many runaway needs are colored by the assumption that “the domestic” is supposed to be separated from “the economic” in male-dominated, capitalist societies. Thus, throughout most of US history, child care has been cast as a “domestic” rather than an “economic” need; it has been interpreted as the need of children for the full-time care of their mothers rather than as the need of workers for time away from their children; and its satisfaction has been construed along the lines of “mothers' pensions” rather than of day care.
¹⁴
Here, the assumption of separate spheres truncates possible chains of in-order-to relations which would yield alternative interpretations of social needs.

Where, then, do runaway needs run to when they break out of domestic or official-economic enclaves? I propose that runaway needs enter a historically specific and relatively new societal arena. Following Hannah Arendt, I call this arena “the social” in order to mark its noncoincidence with the family, official-economy, or state.
¹⁵
As a site of contested discourse about runaway needs, “the social” cuts across these traditional divisions. It is an arena of conflict among rival interpretations of needs embedded in rival chains of in-order-to relations.
¹⁶

As I conceive it, the social is a switch point for the meeting of heterogeneous contestants associated with a wide range of different publics. These contestants range from proponents of politicization to defenders of (re)depoliticization, from loosely organized social movements to members of specialized, expert publics in and around the social state. Moreover, they vary greatly in relative power. Some are associated with leading publics capable of setting the terms of political debate; others are linked, by contrast, to enclaved publics and must oscillate between marginalization and co-optation.

The social is also the site where successfully politicized runaway needs get translated into claims for state provision. Here, rival need interpretations are elaborated into rival programmatic conceptions; rival alliances are forged around rival policy proposals; and unequally endowed groups compete to shape the formal policy agenda. For example, in the US in the 1990s, various interest groups, movements, professional associations, and parties scrambled for formulations around which to build alliances sufficiently powerful to dictate the shape of impending “welfare reform.”

Eventually, if and when such contests are (at least temporarily) resolved, runaway needs may become objects of state intervention. At that point, they become targets and levers for various strategies of crisis management, while also supplying rationales for the proliferation of new state agencies. Such agencies, which comprise the “social state,” are engaged in regulating and/or funding and/or providing the satisfaction of social needs.
¹⁷
They do not merely satisfy, but also interpret the needs in question. For example, the US social-welfare system is divided into two unequal subsystems, which are coded by gender and race: an implicitly “masculine” social insurance subsystem tied to “primary” labor-force participation and historically geared to (white male) “breadwinners”; and an implicitly “feminine” relief subsystem tied to household income and geared to homemaker-mothers and their “defective” (female-headed) families, originally restricted to white women, but subsequently racialized. With the underlying (but counterfactual) assumption of “separate spheres,” the two subsystems differ markedly in the degree of autonomy, rights, and presumption of desert they accord beneficiaries, as well as in their funding base, mode of administration and character, and level of benefits.
¹⁸
Thus, the various agencies comprising the social-welfare system provide more than material aid. They also provide clients, and the public at large, with a tacit but powerful interpretive map of normative, differentially valued gender roles and gendered needs. Therefore, the different branches of the social state, too, are players in the politics of need interpretation.
¹⁹